biztalk247.com
In a nutshell biztalk247.com is a one stop shop for all the BizTalk architects, developers and IT professionals to get resources related to Microsoft BizTalk Server. We are living in the world of information overflow, there is vast amount of information flooded all over the place and we rely purely on search engines to help us find the information. BizTalk247 is an attempt by Microsoft BizTalk Server MVP Saravana Kumar to consolidate all BizTalk resources. The site is all about information gathering and keeping it at one location, making life easier for people who are new to BizTalk server and equally helping advanced user to find stuff easily. The "Choose your Category" link in the home page will give an indication of type of resources collected by BizTalk247.
The site was originally launched on Feb 14 (Valentines day) 2007. With the help of people like Luke Nyswonger, the site got immediate attention within BizTalk community and had thousands of hits on the very first week. The site had some regular updates throughout the year. In November 2008 http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com was launched, which aggregates all the valuable blog post related to BizTalk server in one place, organized in an easy to navigate hierarchical structure, similar to MSDN. The initial release of blogdoc contains around 750 articles and its steadily growing.
biztalk247.com V2
After the release of BizTalk 2009, I've decided to revamp the whole site and give it a face lift and restructure to accommodate all the missing bits from 2006, 2006 R2 and 2009. Apart from the UI update and content restructure the main improvement to the site is user friendly urls. After all the site is all about information about BizTalk Server, so you should be able to get to them easily. The new URL's are easy to remember, for example all the books related to BizTalk server can be accessed via http://www.biztalk247.com/books.aspx, videos at http://www.biztalk247.com/videos.aspx etc
Saravana Kumar
Saravana Kumar is an independent integration architect living and working in London, UK. He is a Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server and a Microsoft Connected System advisor. Saravana has done consulting work for various clients including Accenture, Microsoft, Fidelity Investments, National Health Service (NHS), Unilog(Logica), and British Telecom (BT). Saravana maintains a technical blog focused mainly on BizTalk Server at http://blogs.digitaldeposit.net/saravana/.
Saravana has written white papers and articles for various publications including MSDN and Wrox. In year 2005 he won the Connected Systems Developer competition for designing and building SQL Service Broker Management Studio 2005. Saravana has earned various Microsoft certifications, which includes MCAD (Charter member, first 50 in UK), MCTS (BizTalk 2004/2006), MCTS (Windows/Web/Distributed App for .NET 2.0), MCPD Enterprise App Developer for .NET 2.0. Saravana is an active member in the BizTalk server community which includes UK SOA/BPM user group, BizTalk forums and founder of the 2 famous BizTalk community sites http://www.biztalk247.com and http://blogdoc.biztalk247.com. As part of the MVP program, he regularly participates with the product group interaction (PGI) meetings held with the BizTalk product team in Redmond via LiveMeeting on monthly basis.
Apart from Microsoft BizTalk server he got general interest in learning more about anything that comes out of Microsoft Connected Systems division (WCF, WF, Oslo, Dublin, etc) and he still loves learning the tips and tricks of building good looking and functional websites using ASP.NET for hobby.